Red Dawn Over China: How Soviet support shaped the rise of Communist China

This book explains the dynamics of Chinese politics and shows how the CCP's default response is ruthless control

Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity

by Frank Dikotter

Published by 

Bloomsbury

384 pages ₹799

  In 1937, the American journalist Edgar Snow published Red Star Over China,  a book that introduced Mao Zedong to the world as a romantic, agrarian reformer and a charismatic figure leading a grassroots movement for China’s liberation from a feudal and corrupt regime of the Guomindang or the KMT party headed by General Chiang Kai-shek. For nearly a century, Snow’s narrative served as the foundation for the Western understanding of the Chinese Revolution. With his latest work, Red Dawn Over China, Frank Dikötter offers a persuasive counter-narrative that draws from his meticulous research into the voluminous Chinese Communist Party (CCP) archives, supplemented by Russian archives. It is the approach with which one is familiar in Mr Dikotter’s earlier works, comprising The Tragedy of Liberation, 1945-57, Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-62, and The Cultural Revolution, 1962-76. The latest history reverses the chronology to take us back to the period 1911-45, which saw the birth of the CCP in 1921 in Shanghai and its subsequent transformation into a revolutionary party, leading up to its final victory in the civil war with the KMT in 1949.

 

The four histories together offer a comprehensive, granular and revisionist history of the Communist revolution from its early beginnings to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

 

What are the main takeaways from Mr Dikotter’s latest book?

 

One, he has detailed how the birth of CCP, its ideological identity, its political tactics and military strategy, were all carefully instilled among the CCP leaders and cadres by a succession of Soviet handlers. These were drawn from Soviet experience of using ruthless violence, adopting a culture of secrecy and conspiratorial imaginings, conducting constant and bloody purges and offering a one-party Leninist state as an institutional model. At no time during this period did the CCP have a significant membership or popular following. Its tactics of perpetrating endless violence and recourse to extortion from a countryside already ravaged by war belies its image as a people’s movement.  This enables us to understand the dynamics of current Chinese politics and its institutional underpinnings. The notion that under Mao the CCP was mostly an indigenous movement needs to be nuanced. There were disagreements between the CCP leaders and their Soviet advisors but in most cases, the Soviets were able to impose their own assessments of the situation and the tactics to be followed. Even after the ideological break with the Soviet Union from 1958 onwards, the Soviet imprint on the CCP remained and endures to this day.

 

Two, Mr Dikotter dispels the lingering view of the CCP as an important component of the anti-Japanese coalition in the Pacific war. He produces a wealth of archival evidence to show how the CCP mostly sat out the war and conserved its limited military capacity, while letting the Japanese progressively decimate the KMT. The US belief that the CCP ought to be supported because it was a nationalist more than a communist entity is thoroughly debunked in the book.

 

Three, the CCP and its People’s Army was able to prevail over the KMT, thanks to the material and military support provided by the Soviet Union after the defeat of Japan in 1945. The Soviet Union took over the whole of Manchuria from Japan’s Kwantung Army and made it available to the revolutionary army as a base from which to attack the KMT. The massive volume of weapons surrendered by the Japanese was handed over to the CCP and this support proved crucial in the CCP’s eventual takeover of Beijing and its victory over the rest of the Chinese landmass.

 

The story is repeated in Xinjiang where the Soviets helped by first taking it over and then handing over control to the CCP. In contrast, US and Western assistance and support to the KMT was hesitant and niggardly, influenced by Chiang Kaishek’s reputation as being corrupt and authoritarian.  Mr Dikotter has used Chiang’s dairies to throw light on the complex set of challenges he had to deal with during the 1945-49 civil war. Some historical accounts draw attention to the fact that Stalin was also extending support to Chiang Kai-shek and may have preferred a weak KMT-CCP coalition to rule over post-war China. The present volume shows that the Soviet support to Chiang was tactical while the objective all along was to ensure that the CCP prevailed in the civil war.

 

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China may have initially created the expectation of a government of social reformers and gradual change. The CCP moved swiftly to consolidate its power by dismantling virtually all vestiges of the old order. A one-party Leninist state on the Soviet model replaced the old order within a short span of time, validating the view that totalitarianism is an inherent feature of such a state. There may be adaptations in response to changing domestic and external challenges but whenever power of the party is threatened, the default option is invariably the ruthless imposition of control. We are seeing this play out in the current power play in China.

 

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary